05. facing your inner oppressor

Hey friends,

In this episode, we're diving deep into the emotional overwhelm you might be feeling right now. You may look organized and calm from the outside, but internally, you're wrestling with some serious emotional and spiritual shifts. It's like you're in freeze mode, moving through life while feeling stuck in a spiritual fog.

We talk about the cyclical nature of healing—how you can feel euphoric when you're breaking through old beliefs, only to later hit a wall where you feel stuck or overwhelmed. Right now, it seems like you're in the latter phase, trying to process emotions and energies that feel unfamiliar and destabilizing. You've let go of something that once felt like part of your identity, and now you're facing the discomfort of the unknown.

This episode explores the idea of liberation, both on an individual and collective level. We all have an inner oppressor that echoes the systems of oppression we live in. I use my own experience as a lesbian who repressed her sexuality for years due to compulsory heterosexuality, to illustrate how these systems shape our self-perception. Whether it's internalized homophobia, racism, or other biases, we all have work to do in liberating ourselves from these ingrained patterns.

I pull the Chariot card to remind you that this work of liberation is a lifelong journey. Mistakes will be made, but the important thing is to remain humble, open to learning, and aware that the fight for freedom, both personal and collective, is not a sprint. How can you make it sustainable for yourself? How can you balance progress with self-care, especially when it comes to activist burnout?

We end with a reflection on freedom itself, guided by the King of Swords. Freedom isn't always easy, but it’s about knowing and living your truth. Even when it’s uncomfortable or goes against societal expectations, living your truth is what brings real liberation. So, take a breath, be kind to yourself, and remember that the work you're doing for yourself and others is worth it.

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I use the Queer Tarot Deck by Ash & Chess

Transcript

Hey, welcome back to Sunflowers and Stars, intuitive Tarot for the collective me, your host, Fiona Fletcher, Reid, I want to say a big thank you to anyone who has joined the Patreon community. Really exciting to see that community start to build up again. And I'm recording these ahead of time. So if we've hit 10 members, then your bonus episode will already be in there. If we haven't, then please consider joining, because once I get to 10 members, there'll be a bonus episode in there for ya. Also, if you're just here to listen to this episode, thank you too. Thank you to however you choose to engage with my work, with my content, with this energy, it's something that, as I start to go back into full-time employment, it's really sacred to me. It's it helps me as much as it hopefully helps you. It's a practice that allows me to stay grounded and connected to source and to feel of service outside of my nine-to-five job. So it's a pleasure to be here and really, really grateful that you've chosen to tune in today. So let's get straight into this reading and figure out where you're at, what kind of vibes we are working with. Well, the energy right now, it feels it feels anxious, but it's not, I don't see you as kind of up late at night, worrying, overthinking, think of anything you probably gone into a bit of a freeze mod. So if you've heard of the fight, flight freeze or fawn trauma response to something happens that you just don't really know how to handle, and the survival mechanism kicks in. A lot of us run away. A lot of us get defensive and perhaps fight back. It feels like you're really in freeze mode at the moment. It feels like you are kind of overwhelmed emotionally. I don't I don't know if you're overwhelmed. You might not be overwhelmed in your actual day-to-day life from the outside, that might look like you're actually quite calm. It may look like you're pretty organized and you're you're going about your your work and your family life, quite a thing.

Maybe things look pretty boring from the outside, but it feels like you're going through a bit of emotional overwhelm at the moment, which is, it's not necessarily stalling you in your practical life, but it's maybe stalling you in your spiritual and emotional life. So in episode two, healing is your resistance. We spoke about how healing comes in cycles, and how there can be periods of kind of euphoria where you feel like, oh my god, I'm breaking through these beliefs. I'm overcoming these obstacles. I feel like I can do anything. And we spoke about how these cycles come and go, and so at this point in the cycle, I think you're starting to feel possibly a bit a bit stagnant, a bit stuck, a bit like, Oh my God. I just need some space. I need some time to process. Like, why is all this? Why are all these emotions being thrown at me? I can't handle it. And you're starting to get a wee bit wobbly, I think, on your on trust in your ability to process and heal and to move through the energies that you're processing. Because they're coming, they're coming thick and fast, and they, like I said, they're externally. They might not be related to anything external. It might just be that you're having these, you're kind of having these revelations of, oh wow, like I am not the person I used to be. This is hard to deal with, even if it's a part of you that you thought you were happy to let go of. You know, it could have been a past trauma. Could have been a diagnosis or a personality trait that actually, I don't want that anymore. I'm happy to let go of that. Maybe you actively tried hard to let go of this one thing, and now that it's gone, it's almost like that was a kind of life raft, even though you You knew it wasn't serving your evolution. You know it wasn't serving your growth. It's not until it's gone that you realize, oh, there was some there was some comfort in that. There was some part of my identity that was embedded in that thing, that trauma, that personality trait, that habit, you've let go of it, and now it's gone.

So it feels like you've lost a part of your identity, and that can feel really destabilizing, and that you letting go of that thing may have just created, almost like a kind of crack, or like a like a porthole, that now all this other unknown energy is coming in, and you're like, Whoa. Like, emotionally, it's quite it's quite hard because you're trying to learn and to balance energies that you've never felt before. So be kind to yourself. Be gracious as you move through this. I suppose it's really what people call an integration period because you've kind of done the work, you've achieved the thing, and now it's like, when you move into a new house, you're like, I should be really happy, and like, I should become but actually, I'm still figuring out, you know, how this washer works, and they are the local post offices, and it can be kind of unsettling, even though you know it's going to be okay, and you know you you're happy with your choices and you're in the right place. It doesn't mean that it's not it doesn't still take some, some level of discomfort, in a sense, for you to settle into this new, this new way of being. I wanted to talk a little bit about liberation today, because the undercurrent of why I started this podcast is hopefully to play our part in collective liberation by liberating ourselves on the individual level and then doing that in our communities too, either directly or indirectly.

And so I wanted to ask the cards about facing our inner oppressor, because you probably have already recognized this in yourself, if not, then forgive yourself if this is the first time that you've thought about this as a reality. But we all have an inner oppressor, and I'm going to use the example of sexuality, because that's that's one that I can definitely relate to. For those of you who don't know, lived my life as a straight woman until I was 35 I assumed that I was straight, and when I was 35 I realized that I'm a lesbian, that I've always been a lesbian. That was a happy, very happy realization in one sense, because I finally found this kind of missing piece to my puzzle. A lot of my mental health issues made more sense. Since then, I felt really excited to explore my identity. Knowing this about myself, that my relationship to my body has improved.

There's been so many wonderful consequences of that, but one of the things that I still have to wrestle with is, How did I manage to keep that a secret from myself for so long? Because I always knew, but just because I knew it doesn't mean that I was able and willing to see it, part of the reason, potentially the entire reason that I subconsciously repressed all all this, this major part of myself is because of the systems that I live in, and those systems growing up in the 90s was that you are straight, you are assumed to be straight. It's, it's called compulsory heterosexuality. It's if you Google it, I've written about it before, and lots of other people have written about it too, and it's this idea that heterosexuality is compulsory. It's the default. If you are not that, then you're really setting yourself up to be ridiculed. You are setting yourself up to be excluded, and really just the fact that you have to actively the fact that you have to come out as a queer person, proves the point. You know, if we lived in a world without compulsory heterosexuality, then we wouldn't be discussing people's sexual preferences as though they're They're strange and unusual. It would just be assumed that everybody can love whoever and be attracted to and be in relationships with whoever, regardless of gender or sexuality. Compulsory heterosexuality is the reason why a lot of queer people, myself included, have experienced internalized homophobia. And so when I talk about this, everyone having an internal oppressor, I had and still have internalized homophobia, which is where I talk to myself like the oppressor. I talk to myself in a way that people in power treat lesbian women. So if I'm in the shops looking at outfits, and I see something I really like, and then subconsciously or consciously, think to myself, Oh, that's a bit Butch, or it's a bit manly. Or if I choose not to wear makeup one day, then I might think, oh, no, you should really put some makeup on.

To make yourself look a bit more feminine, even though that's not necessarily how I feel. So I have had to and still continue to try and catch this internal oppressor that lives within me. And really that's the that is. The insidious thing about systems of oppression is that they become so effective that they barely need to use force or propaganda after a while, because it becomes so drummed into humanity and certain parts of culture that this is the way things should be, that we just start to believe it, and it becomes part of our culture, becomes a part of our language, our opinions, and we actually begin to uphold the systems ourselves without even realizing it. So for example, you might see someone not wearing makeup. You might see a woman who looks kind of bitch and be like, Oh, that's that's a kind of strange looking women, when actually that's just what women look like. In terms of racism, it could be, you know, I was brought up in an area of Scotland where there I don't know if I ever saw a person of color until I went to university, or certainly would have seen a person of colour if I'd gone into the city, but it was very rare. And so it was, it was drummed into to me, certainly through, not through conversation, but just through us. At the way I saw other people acting was that people of color were somehow dangerous, which is, of course, a generalization.

That's not true. And I've had to check stuff like that as a as an adult, you know, fallen into biases that are actually racist at the root, and so it's a constant reevaluation of the biases and the decisions and the opinions that we have, and as important work, especially for white people, I pulled the chariot card Here, and all the stuff I've just spoken about is it's quite heavy. It feels like it is work. That's why we call it the work. And with the chariot, it's sources saying you're going to make some mistakes with this work. As you free yourself and free others, there's no time like the present to start doing the work, but also be aware that as you go on this journey, you may have confidence, you may have the good intentions, but Be humble.

Be prepared to be humble to be faced with people who don't understand, to be faced with people who are many steps ahead of you in their journey and can give you some really good advice. So being open to hearing other people's points of view, being open to learning this, this kind of work, the work of collective liberation, as a lifelong commitment. So really, how can you make it sustainable for you long term? How can you give yourself grace to go at a pace that feels like it's not going to overload your nervous system and it's not going to lead to activist burnout?

I think it's an initiation that a lot of us go through. I certainly experienced it this year, all the terrible images coming out of Gaza over the last year, I got to the point where couldn't really help anyone, because I couldn't help myself. So moving forward in this journey, and being able to go at a pace that leads to progress, but not to your detriment. Yes, you will have to sacrifice. Part of fighting for liberation is using our privilege, and sometimes that means letting go of some privileges that we have in order to support other people and to give to other people, but finding a way to do that doesn't burn you out or make you unable to fight at all in the process, a bit of a reality check, I suppose, when we look at The act of trying to free yourself and free others is that, yes, you're you're probably feeling emotionally overwhelmed right now, and that's a totally valid response. It's valid, but please don't let it stop you from continuing to do the work. And you know, we talk about the fight for collective freedom, and I think we can start by freeing ourselves and freedom ask the cards, what does freedom feel like for you?

And we got king of swords. So freedom for you is all about truth. It's all about knowing what your truth is. And that's something that I use this podcast, or I use this podcast to communicate my my energy, my messages that come from source. This is my truth. This is the truth that I feel energetically coming through me, and even now, I feel some resistance to sharing that with you, because I know that not all these messages will land. I know that I will have good days and bad days. I know that self doubt for me is a kind of undercurrent that just pops in and out. Sometimes it's here, sometimes it's really strong. Sometimes I can barely feel it. But freedom is when you're able to embody your truth, live your truth be a beacon of truth for others, and for it to feel not easy, but for it to flow with ease, because living your truth and embodying your truth can come with conflict when other people don't like it, don't understand it, or when it butts up against systems and structures.

Living your truth can come with complications, but for you, freedom is when that truth makes itself known easily. It may be difficult to enact and to embody, but you know what your truth is. So if you're looking for moments of freedom, because I think a lot of us think I'm free, I've got freedom, and then other days we feel so chained down by other people's expectations, by relationships family members, by the workplace, by social media and technology, we feel like we're not free at all, but there is always tiny freedoms that we can that we can look for and that we can cling on to.

As we spoke to about life rafts, there are little freedom life rafts that you can identify throughout the day to remind yourself that you have been and are always free, energetically speaking and like I say, those little freedom life rafts are your truth. That's what they feel like. So if you're looking for proof of freedom, look for the moments in your day where you feel like you are feeling, experiencing or embodying your truth could be something as simple as doing a yoga class and choosing not to do the full expression of the pose, because you know in your body what is comfortable, and you know your history, you know your injuries, you know your capacity, so You You just do what you can do that day, and that feels like your truth, even though there's an egoic part of you that wants to stretch further and wants to be the best person in the yoga class, you want to push yourself to do more in the moment when you take a pause check in With your truth, and you say, No, I know what's right for me in this moment. And you do it and it feels right, you get that energetic confirmation of, yes, this feels good, this feels right. I feel at peace. That's your truth, and then that truth is your freedom.

And as I was pulling these cards, asked, how, how will you break free. What's the journey towards your freedom? I pulled the six of cups which I laughed because it's just perfect card to signify your journey towards freedom, because this is the card that's all about nurturing your inner child, and that's the truth. You know, I just spoke about all the ways that through childhood I was conditioned and traumatized, to be honest, to make the assumption that I was a heterosexual woman and traumatized by the narrative that to be a lesbian was social suicide. So a lot of the freedom for me has been working on telling that child version of me that that's not true, that she is valued and lovable and loved and perfect as she is, and that she doesn't need to change fit in, that she doesn't need to find a man to feel valuable, that she can express herself in any way that feels true to her. And so for you, the journey toward freedom is going to look similar in that there's going to be some sort of investigation and excavation into the stories that you were told as a child. Could be a young child, a teenager, a young adult, all those formative years, what stories narratives were drummed into you that are now surfacing in your life in ways that make you feel chained, that make you feel trapped. Because a lot of the time, you're trapped by a story. You're not trapped by circumstance. You're not trapped physically or locked in you're trapped by expectations, other people's expectations, your own expectations, your fear of being seen in a certain way.

A lot of the time, our chains can be unlocked when we simply see that story as a story that no longer serves us, a story that we no longer believe, that we choose not to buy into. And for you, this might be something like your story growing up is that you've got to be a good neighbour, okay, if you were brought up in a community, a small village where everybody knew everyone and maybe your neighbours looked after you as a kid when your mum was at work, or you helped wash the neighbour's cars, or what.

Ever you've been brought up with the story, you've got to be a good neighbour. And now cut to today, one of the reasons you're overwhelmed is because you feel obligated to help your neighbours. So perhaps you're walking a neighbour's dog, perhaps you're now helping an elderly neighbour, doing lots of shopping for them going to the post office, for them, maybe it's all got a bit out of hand, and now you're feeling chained. You're feeling like your life isn't your own because you've given up a portion of your time that you now kind of feel resentful to but you won't allow yourself to say no, you won't allow yourself to prioritize your own energy because you believe that you have to be a good neighbour, and it's not to say whether this is right or wrong, because, of course, it's a beautiful thing to help those around you, but if there's some resentment there and it's leaving it is creating a feeling of being trapped and being chained to other people's wants and needs to your own detriment, then I would argue that is something worth looking at in regards to freeing yourself if you're working towards wanting to feel more free and also to stand in Your truth, for your truth to be that actually I don't have the time to walk your dog every day and still maintain some semblance of a personal a social life. Perhaps it's your truth, as every Wednesday, I normally go to yoga, and that really helps me stay balanced. It helps me manage my energy. It helps me feel better at work. It helps me feel more calm and more comfortable in my body. And I've pushed that aside because somehow I feel sick to my stomach if I was to refuse to walk this person's dog. And that is the real visceral response that you will get when we're talking about how the oppressor, how that structure, how those old stories make you feel, is it's a really deep sense of, if I don't do this, I'm a bad person. I'm simply wrong as a person. And that's because these beliefs are so they're like stamped in permanent ink like they are so deeply ingrained in us because they started in childhood, because they probably came from our parents or our caregivers, who we put complete faith and trust into, and believed everything that they said, no matter what. But now you're an adult, you get to make your own decisions. You get to decide that you are still a good person, whether you walk the neighbour's dog or not. You get to decide that you have the freedom to choose. And remember we spoke about before in saying no to someone, you get to give them the gift of figuring that out on their own.

You can only control your own experience, and if your experience, your life experience, is feeling out of alignment, then you have every right to communicate that, to communicate a boundary, and to manage your own experience and to allow them to have their reaction, whatever their reaction is, and for you to keep it separate from you. Something that's been really helping me recently, I think, I think I'm an empath.

I feel very affected by other people's energy. Something that's been helping me recently is when I feel myself getting tangled up, my energy getting tangled up in someone else's I say internally to myself, and I visualize myself putting my hands up as though, like my palms up towards the person, as though I'm creating a sort of force field, a sort of boundary. And I say to myself, that is not my stuff, and I refuse to take it on. That is not my energy, and I refuse to take it on. I find that to be really helpful. So that's something that may help you. And as you work to uncover these, these old stories, these false rules and regulations we all begin to live by as though it's just fact your your mission, if you choose to accept it as as you learn these things about yourself, is to action those boundaries and to rewrite your own beliefs and to allow other people to see that, because, as I've spoken about before, we have this impact with our energy and you, when you say no to the neighbor about walking the dog, they then have the opportunity to learn from that they might not choose to, but they might then see as interesting that person said no,I wonder what I can say no to.

So the more time that you stay in this space of truth, you speak, you stay and act from a place of personal freedom, the more you lead by example, and also the more that you will find yourself having a direct impact on other people who are, maybe where you were six months ago or a year ago. You know, you'll be talking to friends who, and it could be something really small, a friend saying, I've got, I've got to buy so and so a Christmas present, because they always buy me one. You might find yourself just gently encouraging them to challenge that and say, Well, why? Why do you have to you've, you're you're free, you're free. This is the inner oppressor telling you that you have to blend in, that you have to treat everyone the same as as they treat you. You're buying into this capitalist idea that friendships can only be, only be proven through a financial or physical gift exchange. You know that's not true. You can text that person and say, I love you loads, but I can't afford to buy you a Christmas present, and things will be okay.

So you might find yourself actually having different reactions and conversations and being a bit more bold, and the way that you communicate, in the way that you exhibit your own personal freedom and invite others to do the same. And you know, the knock on effect of that is undeniable, can have effect on hundreds, if not 1000s, of people if you continue to challenge yourself to find your personal freedom and do that on a daily basis. And the final card I wanted to speak about as a SEVEN OF PENTACLES, and really this is just a note of forgiveness for yourself as we talk about acknowledging the oppressive systems and perhaps our unknown complicity in those systems, to forgive yourself for the way you've acted in the past, to be honest about the ways that you may have harmed others or that you may have unknowingly contributed to oppressing those around you, or even just when you were a kid, if you made fun of people for certain things, just to know that you are so lovable, you're so connected to source and just Start the work today. Start the work today of working towards your own personal freedom and working towards fighting for those who are much, much further away from any sense of liberation, and fight on their behalf so that the collective can be liberated, and that this is possibly a good time to let you know that there is a forgiveness and release meditation kind of ritual thing in the Patreon community. It's an edited version of a live workshop I did last year.

It's a full moon workshop, and it's got a forgiveness meditation, and then I talk you through writing a forgiveness letter, and then we release some things that we no longer want to hold on to, and forgiveness is a really important part of freedom and liberation, especially self forgiveness, and that's something that I have to work on regularly and whenever. I do, whenever I feel that energy shift, I do. I do see things start to change in my reality, and I start to feel more optimistic and more confident and more able to create positive change in my life and in the lives of others. So that's all from me today. If you liked this episode, please feel free to leave me a positive review, and the Patreon community is there whenever you're ready. Like I said, when we get to 10 members, there'll be a bonus video. I'm recording this in advance, so the video might be there already. Thank you for listening. So grateful to have you. Love you. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.

Fiona x